Dick Gephardt and the Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece is a tale of a once incredibly handsome, upstanding and moral young man who begins a deep slide into depravity. A painting done of Dorian when his life was filled with the promise of good works begins to change dramatically with every morally compromised and evil action that he takes. Dick Gephardt is like Dorian Gray. Once fighting mightily for Armenian Genocide recognition, in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, something changed in him in 2005. He resigned from serving the public and instead opened a lobbying firm in Washington D.C. Turkish groups became clients of his lobbying firm paying him incredible sums of money. Where once he had fought so forthrightly for advocacy of genocide recognition, he became an avid supporter of the Turkish denial industry, rewriting history. I shudder to think of what a painting of Dick Gephardt would look like now with every morally compromised and evil action he has taken.